Although I always have one or two fiction books, usually crime novels, on the go, I am always on the lookout for an interesting non-fiction book for a change. I've enjoyed some of the tell-all books about the disastrous Trump presidency and I like biographies of interesting people. Sometimes a title will grab my attention as did 'A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived' I stumbled across in one of the classrooms where I was supervising exams the other week. We're not allowed to read in the exams but I absorbed enough from the cover to know that it was about genes and how they impact on our history.
The clincher was a recommendation on the cover from Brian Cox: 'You will be spellbound', and I was.
Beautifully written by Adam Rutherford, it is over 400 pages long and explores how the human animal has grown and developed and how the study of our genes throws light on our history. I read it over three days and, genuinely, couldn't put it down.
This is Day 74 since my knee operation and it's fair to say that I am fed up with limping, walking with a stick and dealing with a stiff joint. I've finished with my group Physio class though I have one more individual session next week. I may never be able to dance the jitterbug again but I'd just like to have my mobility back as it was. I'm told that I must be patient; it will be all right in the end.
We've watched some interesting TV recently, including Season 4 of The Crown and Joanna Lumley's latest spectacular, The Silk Road. Once we moved past Venice and Turkey, which wer a bit ho-hum, we travelled into a part of the world we know very little about, and it is awe-inspiring - the history of Samarkand and the extraordinary modernity of Azerbaijan really opened our eyes. We thoroughly recommend the show.
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